Staff

Julie Marie Lemon

Program Director and Curator

Julie Marie Lemon is the Program Director & Curator of the University-wide Arts, Science + Culture Initiative, developing the strategic and intellectual direction of programming in collaboration with of the Arts, Science + Culture Faculty Advisory Committee. The Initiative serves faculty, students, and beyond. She has 15 years of experience in visual arts interpretation and education and has worked at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; as Art Director at the International School, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. She has a Master of Liberal Arts from the University of Chicago.

Naomi Blumberg

Program Manager

Naomi Blumberg is the Program Manager for the Arts, Science + Culture Initiative. Before coming to UChicago, Naomi was an editor of arts and culture at Encyclopaedia Britannica, following many years working as a curator and exhibition coordinator at art and history museums including the Chicago History Museum, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, and the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College. She holds a BA from Barnard College in art history and a Master's from Tufts University in art history and museum studies.

Lee Jasperse

Graduate Management Fellow

Lee is a Graduate Management Fellow for the Arts, Science + Culture Initiative, and a doctoral student in English at the University of Chicago. He holds an M.A. in Psychology from NYU, where he studied the neuro/psychological dimensions of racialization. His current work at the University of Chicago furthers the ethos of this research, probing how ideas about perception, personality, and personhood produce each other in literary and scientific spheres, with a particular focus on interactions between early 20th-century aesthetic experimentation and popular psychological narratives organizing social difference. He is interested in how theory/methodology-transforming collaborations between artists, activists, humanists, and scientists are staged, and is passionate about cultivating such experiments.

Sila Ulug

Graduate Management Fellow

Sila is a joint PhD student with Art History and TAPS (Theater and Performance Studies), where her interests include performance art, gamification, and thing theory. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, she graduated summa cum laude from Hunter College (CUNY) with majors in Art History, English, Sociology, and the Thomas Hunter Honors Program along with a Minor in Philosophy. She has held summer curatorial posts at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Brooklyn Museum.